ch3 · Months Later

Protecting the workbench, which sits in the dim corner of not a workshop, Vae’s small home stands on stilts. Old pipes actually, groaning from the weight of its heavy, welded foundation, if a house could groan by looks alone. Iron footings plunge down through the softer snow and rests on firn; the stage between fallen snow and compacted glacial ice. The front steps disappear permanently into the same drifts. Dev forgot long ago how many steps he built. The whole structure looks half-swallowed by frozen, colorless waves, moving slowly along with the wind. It used to be Vae and Dev’s small home. It is too far from anywhere. Too quiet for anyone. Which is why she stayed.

From a distance, it could be mistaken for a weather station or a derelict relay post. Only up close do signs make them known that life resides here. Two lives, once. Nearly two years ago. If a house could mourn by looks alone. A dented kettle hangs off the siding. A soot ring around the chimney pipe. A tarp flaps against one corner like a loose thought. All reminders of a stubborn domesticity—a kind of fragile hope that hasn’t yet admitted defeat.

Inside is warmer, but not by much. The insulation is dense but patchworked. The walls, over-layered and sealed with scrap. The furnace is trusty but old, housed somewhere below in the snow. When it kicks on, a vent in the floor exhales—just enough to fight back hypothermia for another hour.

Clutter lines every wall. Pegboards, makeshift cupboards, labeled compartments, tools. Also labeled, mostly. Some blend into others, like an invasive species. Dev’s system Vae tries to keep alive. She makes it make sense for her. The walls fend off the cold outside. The clutter fends off reminders of its relentlessness. A fortress within a fortress.

Space is tight: one sink, one shelf, one small cook unit. And the workbench, the heart of the home, the same place she built him. Zero. A soldering lamp doubles as a bedside light. Optic cables hang where wall art should be. Except for one framed photo: its subject obscured beneath a folded, spotless cloth. Him. She can’t bear to look. Can’t bring herself to take it down.

At the center of the room: a cot, modified for one. Once wider, she cut and re-welded it, though it still has a hinge to open back up. Just in case. But the extra space was long ago surrendered to sorted mechanical bits. The arrangement makes sense only to her, and that’s enough.

Under the covers, Vae stirs.

She doesn’t stretch. Doesn’t yawn. Just swings her legs off the cot, pulls on boots, and tightens the laces without looking. The same every morning.

Despite the cramped quarters, she navigates with ease. Shoulders hunched, eyes half-lidded. The sharp efficiency of someone who’s lived with the same ghosts for too long.

Without pause, she pops a switch on what looks like a complex component waiting to be implemented into something useful. Instead, a sequence of small lights and droid eyes flicker open. Zero is activated.

The droid, once a clunky, sparking, hover-dependent wreck, is now a floating orb of modest size. In eighteen months, she’s refined the hover unit, added two functional arms, upgraded the optics for depth and infrared, fixed the voicebox to sound much more like Dev, eerily so. Antennae for short-range scanning, weight tolerance improved.

He looks nothing like the schematic.

That is, except for the eyes. It took her weeks. Longer, if she were honest. She told herself it was the calibration. But it was more than that. It was his resting expression. The one that used to make her feel seen.

Zero floats to chest height into the air and drifts across the small home, movements fluid, precise. Zero. Too much irony in a name to pass up. He checks the heat valve, levels the brew pot, wipes the counter with a cloth folded precisely in half. They don’t speak. Not yet. That’s the deal. It’s too weird. It’s not him. She knows that. Wishes she didn’t. So they operate in silence. A truce wrapped in routine. The quiet habit. Comfort without acknowledgement.

Vaelyn stands in front of the sink. Hands braced on either side, she stares into the drain like it might answer back. Inside, the war begins again. Regret. Dismissal. Carry on, she remembers. Resolve. She splashes water on her face. Wipes it with a cloth too small to matter. The motions are for him because she still hears him. Carry on. 

Her mind and memory. A marriage, equal parts love and resentment. Absent spite, she allows the union to simply continue. Nothing more. Carry on? She thinks. Fine. Lucky for you, escaping this wasted existence is demanding and dirty. So, for that I’ll carry on. At least for one more day. She finishes wiping her face.

He’s no longer here, but she is. For him. That’s enough—barely. Enough to keep her moving toward a solution she pretends exists, though it refuses to take shape. Leaving is clear enough. She can picture escape a thousand different ways. What she doubts is whether she has it in her to try them all.

The brew is ready.

Vaelyn pulls out two metal cups, still. Out of habit. One she drinks. The other ends up scooping ash from the coal stove. She used to pass the second to him, across their makeshift breakfast table. A memory. No longer part of the routine. Neither is the makeshift table.

She puts on her coat. The same one every day, mended and reinforced. Gloves next, scarred from working outside. Next and always, she picks up the tin, small, light. Inside, his lock of hair. She doesn’t open it. Doesn’t need to. It goes in the inside pocket. Easy to feel it against her ribs. Ever since that fateful day it has stayed within reach.

Outside, the wind has softened to a whisper. Snow dunes stretch nearly across the entire horizon. Except for a faint cliff range and more faint skyline of The Reach. Her destination. The only destination that allows her to carry on.

Parked beside the stilted home, and just as large, is the hauler. Treasured for more than just keeping safe his lock of hair. They fixed it up together. Cobbled repairs from abandoned scrap. A patchwork of salvage and black-market components. It looks like a shipping crate with a cab fitted at on end. Huge wheels in front and massive snow tracks in back. Rusted, oversized, and welded armor over the original panels. Her best guess is twenty-third century technology with sparse twenty-fourth century upgrades. But it still runs. Still.

Over these past eighteen months, it’s become more than a means of transportation. Her welding is cleaner, more precise. Fresh hydraulic connections traverse its underbelly, optimized power cables, and a new suspension.The shape is the same, but its purpose is more now. Autonomous systems with manual overrides. Safety redundancies, spaced out and segmented. Self-contained protocols and a new operating system. It’s neither new nor unfamiliar. Something she doesn’t yet want to name. She’s making it ready. For what, she doesn’t know, which makes it easy to ignore.

Vae gives Zero a nod. Time to go. Lights on his chassis blink. Lights in the hauler’s cab flicker on.

Zero floats ahead to start the power-up sequence. He activates the exterior relay and swings open the driver’s side hatch. Vae turns the furnace down. No lights in the home need turning off. She knows the layout blind. Knows she’s leaving. What’s the point?

The hauler’s interior groans with the effort of waking. Dials blink. Vents cough up warm air. Power-up complete. Zero waits. She climbs up and straps herself into the captain’s seat. They used to play-fight to sit in it. Zero locks a hand to the other chair’s armrest, within arm’s reach of the console’s controls.

Still, they don’t talk.

She grips the wheel and sighs. Then hits the ignition switch.

The hauler growls to life. Then lurches forward. Treads churn the snow. The rig whines but doesn’t stall. They soon pass a rare derelict structure, beyond repair. Most of her home was built from its salvage. They drive on for a long stretch. The hauler’s treads chew steadily through the pale blue drifts. A slow, lumbering plod across pale blue dunes and not much else, into the silence.

The day begins.

She doesn’t do it on purpose, but shortly after the small home recedes beneath the horizon, Vae allows herself to open up. With the obligation of her home’s life support out of sight and the city that killed him still far enough away, she is free to wonder. Not yet hope. But it’s a step.

She looks at Zero. He registers this but doesn’t acknowledge. He’s familiar with the routine. One of eight responses already queued in.

“You’re coming with me today.” She cuts to action items, sooner than usual.

Nothing relevant queued for this declaration. His system searches for the proper response. He scans his surroundings and finally gestures at himself, in the hauler, already coming with her. “Quite the delayed instruction.” Dev’s dry humor, top preference.

“Into the city, I mean.” She amends.

“More of a country boy, myself.” A joke, as filler.

She doesn’t follow up. Action item validated. Conflict.

“I get to meet the other little droids at school?”

“Reduce humor for a minute.” She says, flatly.

“A bit risky, don’t you think?” He says. “Unless they’ve decided to embrace artificial constructs with open arms?”

“Important component’s come in.” She’s never been this direct before. “I’ll connect it ‘soon as I get it. Won’t be staying long today anyway.”

Zero looks at her but doesn’t give a response. His program remains in standby, until something recognizable is registered.

“Then it’ll be complete.” She says to herself.

Recognized and registered. “Thirty-seven.” he chimes.

Vae rolls her eyes. He clarifies.

“You have said ‘It will be complete’ thirty-seven t—”

“It will this time.”

“Thirty-eight times.” His gaze, still directed at her, doesn’t change.

“It’s the last piece…”

“You said ‘last piece’ one hundred and fifteen times.”

“I mean it this time.”

“You’ve said—”

“Don’t give me the tally!”

Zero turns his gaze back at the snow dunes. He waits.

“Thirty-two times.” he confirms to himself.

Vae gives a heavy sigh. “He would cut it off with sarcastic agreement.”

Zero processes this. Then, “I agree with you sarcastically.”

“No,” she corrects him, “like, he’d say ‘Rii…ight.’ …like that. Sarcasm.”

“Rii…i—ight.” Zerro almost sings it, with a glitch in the middle.

“Don’t worry about it.” She assures.

Zero tries again. “R—ii…ight.”

“We’ll take care of today.” She declares. “Take care of all of it.”

“Ominous.” Zero points out.

“Don’t worry.”

“Do I worry …sarcastically?”

“A droid worrying is not sarcasm.” She looks at Zero. “It’s irony.”

She smirks at the thought. Then—cuh-CLUNK—the hauler hits a sharp divot. The wheel jerks up and smacks her lip. She recoils, winces, and wipes her mouth with the back of her glove.

He observes, “Your face is irony.”

She glares.

“Worry about the road.” he quietly confirms.

“Restore previous humor levels.” she says, checking her bloody lip. She tastes blood. And at that, her mind is not in the hauler anymore.

—

It was dusk. The air sharp—even within Kolomb’s walls. Snow hadn’t started falling but the sky looked like it would any second.

She remembered the sting in her chest. The taste of iron in her mouth. It wasn’t pain exactly, but heat. Too much heat, and a buzzing behind her ribs. Then the feeling of floating. On something solid. As if in the sky and on the ground at the same time. Then Dev’s voice.

He was yelling. Her name, she thought, but too distant and muffled to know. Something cold was felt on her chest and ribs. A whine, a click. The jolt cramps her torso with a thud.

Her eyes flew open. Breath ripped into her lungs. Her vision swam among dark shapes. It felt like she was falling, but still. Her ribs burned.

Sound was more clear but piled on top of itself. People yelling. Dev’s voice again, attempting comfort, masking panic. Boots getting louder. Accusations of illegal tech.

And there, the shape comes into focus. The defibrillator. Innocently sitting beside her, still humming. A cold slab casing of outlawed circuitry. And Dev, kneeling, calm yet earnest, desperate for eye contact, as if her eyes were the only safe place his gaze could land.

“Carry on.” she hears, not knowing at the time from whom it came from.

She put it together all at once but her body couldn’t match her desperation. Each physical response, a step behind. She reached but couldn’t hold him. She called out but her words failed to reach an audible volume. She cried but her sorrow stalled. She looked for help but Garren and Siah were already cordoned off. She was left with unanswered desperation, until finally.

“Nno…noO—Oh!!” But he was already being dragged out of sight.

Her body felt scraped raw from the inside. She couldn’t stop crying. Not the kind of tears that come from fear. The kind that come from being thrust back into a world she never wanted.

The last thing she saw was Dev. Calm, even then, telling her it would be okay.

He lied.

—

The hauler bumps over another drift. She blinks hard.

Zero is silent now, clasped to the armrest. Hers this time.

The blood on her glove is too noticeable. It would draw unwanted attention. She’ll have to swap it out.

They crest a ridge. Ahead, a sheer cliff protrudes up sharply, cutting off the horizon. The walls of the Kolomb Reach are past it, wrapped in mist and shadow.

The hauler slows to a halt. Vae interrupts her distant gaze.

“Time to walk.”

She parks behind a long-dormant, salvaged digger chassis. It’s a rusted bulk, half-swallowed by the snow. But the cliff face shields it from the wind and, most importantly, out of sight.

Vae pulls off her gloves and throws them on the dash. She moves to the cargo hold, grabs a pair of skis and straps them to her boots. Fresh pair of gloves, hat, and heavy scarf. She unlatches one of the sleds. The most frankenstein’d one she has. The best one to conceal a half-sentient orb droid.

Zero drifts an eye into the bulkhead doorframe to peer in.

“Yes. You’re coming with me today.” she gestures to a Zero-sized slot in the sled.

Lowering the loading ramp Vae taps her foot as Zero slowly stows himself into place.

“Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” he says, “I will fear no evil…”

“Don’t be dramatic.”

Zero pauses. Processes. “How will I know when I’m ‘complete’?” He asks.

“I’m not gonna explain it all now.” She says impatiently.

Zero waits. He knows that, doing so, results in her explaining at least part of it. She can’t help herself.

“Basically, your machine will learn the code. When it matches enough of his DNA, y’get a confirmation.”

“What confirmation?”

She relents. “You’ll sneeze.”

“I’ll what?”

“You’ll know it when you do it. C’mon, we’re burning daylight.”

Zero looks out a porthole.

“What daylight? It’s cloudy. Also, we don’t burn it. Daylight burns itself—”

“Get in the cart.”

“I will fear no evil, for you are with me…” he continues as she skis down, the unassuming sled in tow. “Your rod and your staff, they comfort me.” He rotates himself to conceal his eyes. His backside a natural camouflage against the rest of the framing and weld marks.

The sled bumps along behind her as she glides silently across the snow toward The Reach, small and distant.

But every stride brings them closer.

Chapter 4: The Reach →

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